The Spectator headline, “Sand mining company pledges $25k a year” (May 1, 2014), certainly caught my attention.  However, what left me speechless was the completely uncritical portrayal of a transaction that should have sent our students and faculty to the campus mall, or better yet, to Schofield in loud protest.

At least, this (in fact a sit-in) is what the students at Washington University in St. Louis staged when they found out that Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, donated $5 million to help launch the school’s “Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization.”

Now, 25 grand annually seems like peanuts in comparison, but the principle is the same: By accepting money from Unimin, the country’s leading sandmining corporation and principal supplier for a particular form of fossil fuel extraction (“fracking”), our university tacitly endorses this highly controversial practice.

While over 90 percent of the world’s scientists confirm the close correlation between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming, we at UWEC apparently are closing our eyes to the enormous environmental degradation wrought by the current oil and gas drilling boom to “fuel” our fossil fuel addiction.  To tout Unimin’s allegedly stellar environmental record is tantamount to praising the hygiene in a lab that produces poison gas.

Instead of greenwashing frac sand mining by establishing at UWEC a so-called “Responsible Mining Initiative” (an oxymoron just as “Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization,” at least when it comes to frac sand mining), we, students and faculty, should join other university communities in the country that are promoting nothing less than a second abolition movement, this time abolishing fossil fuels and instead using all the government subsidies (27 billion annually) and private investments (many billions more) currently enjoyed by the mineral oil companies in order to develop clean energy.  Of course we cannot switch off fossil fuel extraction and consumption over night, but we certainly can accelerate the development of renewable resources!  Instead of a “Responsible Mining Initiative,” what we really need is a new research center for renewable energy management, a project that could involve just about every department on campus!